Saturday, August 24, 2013

Presenting a ready-to-install image of ownCloud for Raspberry Pi

A small introduction to ownCloud

ownCloud is an application which enables users to share their data without giving control to any third party posing as a facilitator. While sharing the data without loosing control is the main objective, ownCloud is much more than that. It can also rapidly sync the data, contacts, calendar events etc from several devices. It can work with several custom backends and it is highly flexible.

Download the archived image from in either zip format (usually for Windows) or gunzip format (usually for Linux and Unix like platforms)Since I am running on Linux, I would download gunzip format.

Extract it and put it on a SD card using dd or any other tool or command. Check out this article on elinux if you need any help for this. Although 2 GB SD card would be fine but I would recommend using 4 GB or more.I would run the following commands:$ gunzip owncloud-raspberrypi-0.1.img.gz # to extract the gz archive$ sudo dd bs=1M if=owncloud-raspberrypi-0.1.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 # to write to the SD card. /dev/mmcblk0 can be obtained by the output of df command.

Run raspi-config and follow the directions to expand the filesystem to enjoy maximum disk space. Reboot, if required.

Run ifconfig to get the ip address of the Raspberry Pi.

That is it. Just open http://<ip_address>/owncloud and create the admin user and explore ownCloud on Raspberry Pi.

This image PHP execution time increased to 60 seconds and the upload limit has been bumped up to 500M. The Apache is set to allow .htaccess for the protection of data directory. Also SSH has been enabled by default.